scholarly journals Cromwell's Edinburgh Press and the Development of Print Culture in Scotland

2011 ◽  
Vol 90 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Scott Spurlock
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Printing Industry ◽  
Key Factors ◽  
Foreign Markets ◽  
The Press ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
Printed Word

Alasdair Mann, the noted scholar of book culture in early modern Scotland, has suggested that a significant change had occurred in Scotland's relationship with the printed word by the late seventeenth century. This study sets out to explain how the interregnum served as a ‘watershed’ during which a consumer demand was created for popular print and how this in turn necessitated a significant increase in the production and distribution of printed material. Beginning with the sale of the press and patent of Evan Tyler to the London Stationers’ Company in 1647, the article charts the key factors that transformed Scotland's printing industry from the production of official declarations and works for foreign markets to the production of polemical texts for a Scottish audience. These developments also witnessed publication of the first serial news journal and the growth of a competitive market for up-to-date printed news. More than just an anomaly that flourished during a decade of occupation, these fundamental changes altered Scotland by introducing the large-scale consumption of chapbooks and printed ephemera, thereby initiating the nation's enduring print culture.

The Press and the People

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Fox
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
The People ◽  
The Press ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
Single Sheet ◽  
Popular Texts ◽  
Cheap Print ◽  
British Culture

This is the first full-length study of cheap print in early modern Scotland. It traces the production and distribution of ephemeral publications from the nation’s first presses in the early sixteenth century through to the age of Burns in the late eighteenth. It explores the development of the Scottish book trade in general and the production of slight and popular texts in particular. Focusing on the means by which these works reached a wide audience, it illuminates the nature of their circulation in both urban and rural contexts. Specific chapters examine single-sheet imprints such as ballads and gallows speeches, newssheets and advertisements, as well as the little pamphlets that contained almanacs and devotional works, stories and songs. The book demonstrates just how much more of this reading matter was once printed than now survives and argues that Scotland had a much larger market for such material than has been appreciated. By illustrating the ways in which Scottish printers combined well-known titles from England with a distinctive repertoire of their own, The Press and the People transforms our understanding of popular literature in early modern Scotland and its contribution to British culture more widely.

scholarly journals The Witch-cleric Stereotype in a Seventeenth-Century Lutheran Context*

2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Rowlands
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
Innocent People ◽  
Modern Germany ◽  
Witch Trials ◽  
Wide Perspective ◽  
The Witch ◽  
The Devil ◽  
Over Time

Abstract This article enhances our understanding of the development and dynamism of early modern witch stereotypes by focusing on the stereotype of the witch-cleric, the Christian minister imagined by early modern people as working for the devil instead of God, baptizing people into witchcraft, working harmful magic and even officiating at witches’ gatherings. I show how this stereotype first developed in relation to Catholic clerics in demonology, print culture and witch-trials, then examine its emergence in relation to Protestant clerics in Germany and beyond, using case studies of pastors from the Lutheran territory of Rothenburg ob der Tauber from 1639 and 1692 to explore these ideas in detail. I also offer a broader comparison of beliefs about Protestant witch-clerics and their susceptibility to formal prosecution with their Catholic counterparts in early modern Germany, showing that cases involving Protestant witch-clerics were part of a cross-confessional phenomenon that is best understood in a comparative, Europe-wide perspective. In addition to showing how the witch-cleric stereotype changed over time and spread geographically, I conclude by arguing that three distinct variants of this stereotype had emerged by the seventeenth century: the Catholic ‘witch-priest’ and Protestant ‘witch-pastor’ (who were supposedly witches themselves) and the overzealous clerical ‘witch-master’, who was thought to do the devil’s work by helping persecute innocent people for witchcraft. Despite these stereotypes, however, relatively few clerics of either confession were tried and executed as witches; overall, patriarchy worked to protect men of the cloth from the worst excesses of witch persecution.

Francis Kirkman's Counterfeit Authority: Autobiography, Subjectivity, Print

PMLA ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 121 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jody Greene
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
The Self ◽  
Literary Authority ◽  
The Press ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ultimate Failure ◽  
Authorial Persona

This essay explores the relation between print culture and literary authority in seventeenth-century England, through the career of the rogue author, translator, and autobiographer Francis Kirkman. Barred from traditional forms of authority by his middle-class birth and rudimentary education, Kirkman claimed new forms of self-authorization promised by the press. In his autobiography, The Unlucky Citizen, as well as in his biography of the impersonator Mary Carleton, the self-styled “German Princess,” Kirkman developed strategies of counterfeiting authority to compensate for the traditional entitlements he, like Carleton, lacked. These strategies involved harnessing the press to circulate authoritative versions of his authorial persona that were intended to substitute for his unauthorized status. Kirkman's ultimate failure to “gain some Reputation by being in Print” is instructive for scholars interested in the history of autobiography and in the changing conditions of authorship in the first era of print culture. (JG)

Colonialism, Articulation, and Modes of Production at an Early Seventeenth-Century English Colony in the Western Caribbean

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles E. Orser
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Capitalist Mode ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
Western Caribbean ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
Mode Of Production

Early-modern European colonialism necessarily involved the transplantation of an existing capitalist mode of production into an unfamiliar environment. A key issue in the transplantation involved articulating with pre-existing forms of production and distribution. Understanding the process of articulation helps to explain the colonialist process and the expansion of capitalism in a broad way. The early seventeenth-century English colony of Providence Island in the Western Caribbean provides a useful, specific example.

scholarly journals AFRICA AND THE PRICE REVOLUTION: CURRENCY IMPORTS AND SOCIOECONOMIC CHANGE IN WEST AND WEST-CENTRAL AFRICA DURING THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

2016 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
TOBY GREEN
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Central Africa ◽  
Socioeconomic Change ◽  
The Past ◽  
Modern Economy ◽  
West Central ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
Social Uses

AbstractThe past decade has seen much ink spilled on global interconnections in the early modern economy, especially those linking European and Asian economies. But this Eurasian concentration has excluded Africa from the discussion. This article addresses this absence by showing that West and West-Central Africa were integral to the global price revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Considering evidence from West and West-Central Africa reveals how the price revolution was a genuinely global phenomenon, with increasing imports of locally-used currencies that created inflation in line with the inflation of gold and silver in Europe and Asia. The article argues that the coexistence of exchangeable value and other social uses of currencies also contributed to a relative depreciation in Africa's global economic strength. Also related to this phenomenon were the rise of an export slave trade and changes in the production and distribution of West and West-Central African cloth industries.

scholarly journals Tracing the Influence of Ming-Qing Buddhism in Early Modern Japan: Yunqi Zhuhong’s Tract on Refraining from Killing and on Releasing Life and Ritual Animal Releases

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (10) ◽  
pp. 889
Author(s):  
Barbara R. Ambros
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Edo Period ◽  
Early Modern Japan ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Ming Buddhism

This essay traces the Japanese reception of Zhuhong’s Tract on Refraining from Killing and on Releasing Life in the early modern period. Ritual animal releases have a long history in Japan beginning in the seventh century, approximately two centuries after such rituals arose in China. From the mid-eighth century, the releases became large-scale state rites conducted at Hachiman shrines, which have been most widely studied and documented. By contrast, a different strand of life releases that emerged in the Edo period owing to the influence of late Ming Buddhism has received comparatively little scholarly attention despite the significance for the period. Not only may the publication of a Sino–Japanese edition of Zhuhong’s Tract in 1661 have been an impetus for Shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi’s Laws of Compassion in the late-seventeenth century, but also approximately thirty Japanese Buddhist texts inspired by Zhuhong’s Tract appeared over the next two and a half centuries. As Zhuhong’s ethic of refraining from killing and releasing life was assimilated over the course of the Edo and into the Meiji period, life releases became primarily associated with generating merit for the posthumous repose of the ancestors although they were also said to have a variety of vital benefits for the devotees and their families, such as health, longevity, prosperity, and descendants.

Positional spelling redistribution: word-initial / and / in Early Modern English (1500–1700)

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
MARCO CONDORELLI
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Quantitative Model ◽  
Printing Industry ◽  
Quantitative Investigation ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Potential Factors ◽  
Early English ◽  
Diachronic Development ◽  
The Relationship

The alternations in <u>/<v> and <i>/<j> are among the most well-known and commented-upon changes in Early Modern English spellings, yet little has been said about the potential factors underlying their standardisation, and whether and how the two alternant pairs could be linked together. The reason behind this knowledge gap may be found in the absence of a large-scale, quantitative investigation of these spellings, and consequently, the impossibility of commenting upon the relationship between patterns of chronological development and potential causes of change. This article focuses on the standardisation of word-initial <u>/<v> and <i>/<j> between 1500 and 1700 in printed English, and uses a quantitative model for the analysis of patterns of diachronic development in the two alternant pairs, across a range of texts from a sampled version of Early English Books Online. The results describe a rather abrupt, synchronised change in the redistribution of word-initial <u>/<v> and <i>/<j> between the 1620s and the 1640s. The discussion argues for a close connection between the diachronic developments in word-initial <u>/<v> and <i>/<j>, and pragmatic factors that affected the Early Modern English printing industry.

Language Matters: ‘Counsel’ in Early Modern and Modern Medicine

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Sabroe ◽  
Phil Withington
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Successful Scientist

Francis Bacon is famous today as one of the founding fathers of the so-called ‘scientific revolution’ of the seventeenth century. Although not an especially successful scientist himself, he was nevertheless the most eloquent and influential spokesperson for an approach to knowledge that promised to transform human understanding of both humanity and its relationship with the natural and social worlds. The central features of this approach, as they emerged in Bacon’s own writings and the work of his protégés and associates after 1605, are equally well known. They include the importance of experiment, observation, and a sceptical attitude towards inherited wisdom (from the ‘ancients’ in general and Aristotle in particular).

Multiple-source Record Linkage in a Rural Industrial Community, 1680–1820

1994 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 133-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve King
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Life Cycles ◽  
Multiple Source ◽  
Demographic Analysis ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Industrial Community ◽  
The Social ◽  
Broad Outline

Re-creating the social, economic and demographic life-cycles of ordinary people is one way in which historians might engage with the complex continuities and changes which underlay the development of early modern communities. Little, however, has been written on the ways in which historians might deploy computers, rather than card indexes, to the task of identifying such life cycles from the jumble of the sources generated by local and national administration. This article suggests that multiple-source linkage is central to historical and demographic analysis, and reviews, in broad outline, some of the procedures adopted in a study which aims at large scale life cycle reconstruction.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document